New

The source of this piece is a line from the 2002 Spike Jonze movie Adaptation, in which Meryl Streep plays New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean, real life author of The Orchid Thief. In the swamp scene Streep’s character, drug-addled and distraught at the murder of her lover, breaks down. Her hysterical monologue includes the line: “I want to be new, like a baby,” suggesting the urge to reinvent, to start over, tolivethe quotidian as a new encounter.